I haven’t written here in a while. We’ve had some cage-rattling things going on here on Jolly Lane, and my writing-mode has been switched to “off” for the past four months or so. But through some of the “sound and the fury” a thought hit me this morning, and I had to get it out.

I once had a pastor in whom I had placed a lot of stock and faith. He taught exegetically and was helpful in that he would surround scripture with relevant context. I learned and grew a good bit through that teaching. Ironically, combined with enhanced sensitivity to the Holy Spirit (thanks to another true friend’s guidance) it was the context-formation through the teaching I’m referencing that made the past few months bearable. Who knew?

But several months ago on a Sunday morning this pastor said something that really rattled my cage. Near the end of his message, he suggested that he sometimes doubted his own salvation. Implied was the question: “have I done enough?”

This was the same pastor, also, who, strangely enough, ended most ALL of his messages with the admonition that if you think you can do even ONE THING in addition to simply receiving Christ’s sacrifice as atonement for your sins, then you are, de facto, falling short. To think that you need to “DO” in order to be “GOOD ENOUGH,” was in itself proof positive that you weren’t. I happen to think this is reasonable. Living with the notion that you can earn your way into the presence of God is to discard outright the totality of Christ’s sacrifice as the sole means by which this can be accomplished.

“HEY, JESUS, THANKS AND ALL, WELL PLAYED, YES, BUT THERE ARE SOME OTHER THINGS I HAVE TO DO IN ORDER TO MAKE WHAT YOU DID SUFFICIENT!”

This of course is stupid, as it demonstrates that we are better arbiters of discerning what God wants and requires than God Himself. It’s like making ourselves more holy than God, and good luck with that.

But back to this pastor…

He asked this [rhetorical?] question out loud, publicly, not only once, but at least twice over the ensuing several months. “Am I complete? Am I ‘in’? Have I done enough?”

This is troubling on many levels (three, actually,) two of which are more troubling than the remaining. Let’s look at them for a second.

Understanding the motivation, or impetus for saying such a thing to an entire congregation who is hanging on your every word for their own personal sense of security is extremely important. Of the three levels at issue here, one level is understandable. The second level is disturbing. And the third level is downright malevolent. So let’s start with the first level, and even, in good faith, attribute this motivation to the pastor I am referencing.

The first level of motivation (“Level One”) indicating one’s crisis of eternal security stems from a lack in faith in EVERYTHING… Is anything real? In this case, we are considering the faith-crisis that has befallen ALL of us at one time or another, the crisis where we ask ourselves,

“…is this paradigm of reality that I have accepted reasonable or even real?”

This is the part where we go, “What is reality? Who is God? Is the Bible real? Can we bet our lives on its message? Is the process it describes truly “The Way?” How do we know? Does it align itself with our analysis of the physical universe? Is the theology that we are counting on to “get us in” trustworthy? Have I placed my bet on the right number? How do I know?

This is an incredibly understandable thought process, because humans are, by design, hard to convince of things. Call it a survival mechanism. Who wants to be a gulla-bull? That’s how folks die! Best to play it safe, test everything, trust nothing. And let’s be fair: reality is a pretty crazy story… Best to be skeptical… Much safer…

There’s not one of us who is exempt from this logistic crisis, and if you claim to be then shame on you. You really should check things out a bit more thoroughly before just jumping in. I offer (don’t worry… I’m not going to flood you with scripture…):

“But test everything; hold fast what is good.” – 1 Thessalonians 5:21

“Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” – Acts 17:11

“Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.” – John 4:1

These three references, just for starters. Feel free to flesh this out more completely on your own time.

In essence therefore I submit that it is perfectly understandable to question the PREMISE of that which you believe, especially if the belief we are analyzing involves your personal eternal security. That’s definitely one you need to get right, and a healthy amount of doubt from time to time proves our humanity and keeps us sharp. Test everything!

The second level of motivation (“Level Two”) indicating one’s crisis of eternal security stems from a lack of faith in GOD’S WORD. Is it right? In this case we are not questioning existence or reality, but rather our understanding of that which we have already accepted as true via faith and observation. This is the crisis where we ask ourselves,

“…what if I got it all wrong, and what I have always thought was true about salvation is actually incomplete?”

This, then, is the part where we go, “Is the Bible complete? Is it correct? Have I read it right? Have I missed something? Is it [The Bible] being deliberately tricky in order to separate the Truly Faithful from the Spiritually Lazy? What if I really HAVEN’T done “enough…” the path is narrow, right? What if I THINK I’ve done it right, but there are crucial elements unknown by me?

Now this is a problem, a bigger problem involving much more than just the individual carrying the burden of doubt. …a bigger problem especially if this person is a pastor with a congregation who depends (for better or worse) on his discernment and guidance to and through conviction. To share doubt at this level as a PASTOR (“Level Two”) can have catastrophic consequences, yet in good faith we are going to consider them unintended. When a congregation hears the same pastor who has, for years, been saying that there is not one single thing you can do to complete the work done by Jesus on your behalf… pronounce that he himself is not assured of HIS OWN SALVATION…

Well…

What effect could and would that have on the congregants?? If the flock is led to believe that the shepherd himself is not convinced of his own position, then what then is the effect on the faith of the flock itself? In 2026-speak, that sounds like:

“Wait WHAT?? He’s been telling us for years that there is nothing we can do to ensure our salvation except to believe and receive, and NOW we find out he’s not even assured of his own?? What the actual HECK??? He’s the PASTOR! And even HE doesn’t know?? That means I’m in deep weeds!”

A pastor publicly questioning his own salvation is irresponsible, egregious and devastating for his congregation... Resultant culture: “If he’s not ‘getting in’ then what chance do I have?”

This is really bad, but it helps me segue into the most-est, more baddest-er thing, “Level Three”™

What if the pastor leveraged that innate disparity of parishioner/pastor assurance of salvation IN ORDER to breed self-doubt and discontent in the parishioners?

What if the pastor was only saying that he was “insecure” in order to utilize the inherent and persistent crises of faith in those who AREN’T pastors, (the congregants,) thereby capitalizing/mechanizing/utilizing the element of GUILT?

It wouldn’t be the first time guilt was weaponized by The Church. In fact, over the centuries The Church has perfected the art. Sun Tzu would be proud.

Evangelicals, for pretty much ever, have been lying and manipulating in order to drag people to the foot of the cross. The ends, it seems, justify the means… (at least this time, every time)

Mike Warnke, a “Christian Comedian” completely fabricated his story about being a satanic “High Priest” and even wrote a book, “The Satan Seller” describing his [fictitious] biography. All this, presumably, to win souls for Christ. Imagine the feelings of emptiness in 1992 that was felt by those who had previously been inspired by him when the scandal was revealed by Cornerstone Magazine.

In another case Christian music icon Mylon LeFevre, (one whom I personally knew) became famous in his inner circle for manufacturing, on stage, stories of “miracles” that allegedly happened to him and his band during the years that they travelled. This presumably to foster faith in his crowds… As he spoke between songs during concerts the band behind him would look at each other with one eyebrow raised… (“I don’t remember that… do you??”)

Remember, in Christiandom, the ends justify the means.

Just kidding. It’s not true because that would be deception, and Satan is the father of lies. God doesn’t need our “help” (or Satan’s) to make His message sexier. It stands on its own and is 100% sufficient. Our job is simply to obey. God does the heavy lifting. Every time.

So. Is this what my pastor was doing? No. Absolutely not. I don’t think so. Maybe but probably not. Most likely. Not. I think, mostly, no. Yeah: no.

But did his public admission of doubt in his own salvation sow seeds of distrust and discontent among his parishioners? Without question. I speak with authority, because I was one of them, and I know how it made ME feel. Yet deep inside, knowing the truth about the assurance of salvation, I recovered quickly. I can’t speak for the rest.

“It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.” Luke 17:2

Yes, I do have thoughts on “all the things,” and what a lot of them there are... Addressing the more salient issues, regarding our action in the Middle East, ...this isn’t a “war” yet... This is, so far, Trump personally using the US war MACHINE to pick a personal fight, from what I can see. And there is zero solidarity with any other country in the world in this; it seems to be unilateral, and not even per the US but just Trump himself. It’s literally, Trump (and, don’t forget, Netanyahu) against planet earth. Does this seem okay? Especially when the US is actively being eaten alive from the inside out right now? I’m not sure I’m okay with it... ...For several reasons, none of them being that I like Iran. We have been promised that Iran is only “two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon” for over 20 years now. Also, I was told about 8 months ago that we had “entirely obliterated” their capacity to make nuclear weapons. Yet that is allegedly the reasoning behind our starting this “war” in the first place. So, yeah. Who knows what to believe from anyone anymore?

President Trump has made the statement to Brian Kilmeade that “[he will] “feel it in his bones” [when the ‘war’ should be over...]”

Huh? What does that even mean? And is it the prerogative of a president to unilaterally (that word again) start and end wars? I was under the impression that it was not. Friday (Thursday?) Trump said the words, “We won!”

What does that mean? What does that look like? If this is, in fact true, then why is this conflict escalating the very next day, Tuesday, and even more today, Wednesday?

Was he mistaken?

Also, and this is very important, I repeat: what does “winning” look like? “Bombing the hell out of them?” (Trump quote, again) Does it look like regime change? If so, do we stay there to ensure there is no insurgency? Would this, then, be considered a “forever war?”

I don’t see how this can end, now that it has begun. And the fallout will be very painful. We are already, that means NOW, enduring the greatest throttling of energy the world has ever seen. The downstream effects are going to be sobering. You don’t just “start” and “stop” the production of energy. I’m not sure of the ratio of time, but for each day “E” that energy is shut down, it takes “E x Y” to start it back up. You don’t just flip a switch. And everything uses energy. Not just your car. The prices of goods sold should very soon dramatically increase. In fact, they already are. The dominoes that will fall are impossible to predict, so chaotic is this situation and its potential externalities.

The fact that Google searches yesterday favored “Academy Awards” over “war in Iran” by a factor of FOUR TIMES HIGHER tells me that there is really not much left worth saving of this Constitutional Republic we call home.

Pop some popcorn and pull up a chair. You are witness to the end of... I’m not exactly sure what, but it’s definitely an end... And we haven’t even talked about AI or the deployment of humanoid battle robots in Ukraine.

https://x.com/NateSchlomann/status/1996667748722541054?s=20

It’s only six and a half minutes of your precious time, but it’s worth it.

In response, I direct you to the first words of Solomon in his brilliant Ecclesiastes:

1 The words of the Preacher,^[a] the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

² Vanity^[b] of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
³ What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
⁴ A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.

There are various ways of translating the Hebrew word, hevel, but the english equivalent, “vanity,” is only scratching the surface in the depth of its meaning. The best thing we can do with the fewest number of words, however, is to replace it with “futility,” or “meaninglessness.”

I am neither a linguist nor a Bible scholar… but:

If man’s work is meaningless, then what of the lack of work altogether? The lack of reward? The fruitless pursuit of etheral vapor which is virtual reality created for our placidity by an Artificial Intelligence?

Let me say that again…

“The fruitless pursuit of etheral vapor which is virtual reality created for our placidity by an Artificial Intelligence?”

What could be worse than The Worst?

I describe to my students the importance, in this world, in this life, of WORK. It’s one’s identitry. Doubt me? The next time you find yourself in a populated social setting, listen around… after learning the name of a new acquaintance, what is the SECOND QUESTION ANYONE ASKS?

“What do you do?”

It turns out “doing,” despite Solomon’s admission that even DOING is meaningless, yes, DOING is important. Even if it accomplishes relatively nothing in the long run… (unless your “DOING” involves proselytizing, which would be an interesting aside one might take when one meets Solomon in person) …it is your legacy; your mark. Your DOING is the memory of Who You Are/Were. There’s not a contradiction here; Solomon was looking at the macro view. We are cursed to exist in the micro view. We have to work, even though it’s meaningless in the macro view.

“Work” is how we get spouses, kids, property, associations, fulfillment of the innate need to create and provide.

Listen carefully, because this next thing is important:

Then what of the plight of this keystone segment of the Western World’s population, an entire generation stripped of hope by a system designed to emasculate the men and “liberate” the women… …WHEN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE REMOVES EVEN THE HOPE OF BUILDING A LEGACY BORNE OF “WORK?”

“It’ll be great,” they say. “You won’t have to work,” they say. “You’ll have guarenteed Universal Basic Income,” they say. “You’ll be free to create, artistically, borne of your deepest desires and for your own heart’s content,” they say.

But that’s not how it goes. “…if any would not work, neither should he eat.” “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground.” And it’s about more than just food. Again, “work” is how we get spouses, kids, property, associations, fulfillment of the innate need to create and provide.

And it’s not looking good. Per “Today’s Homeowner” (.com)

As of 2024, only about 1 in 4 home buyers is a first-timer — the lowest share since the National Association of Realtors began tracking the data in 1981. At the same time, the average age of a first-time home buyer has climbed to 38, up from 35 in 2023 and from the late 20s back in the 1980s. The typical first-time buyer now has a household income of $97,000, a jump of $26,000 in just two years. (Emphasis mine)

And regarding progeny? Although these statistics have, in the past two years, dramatically increased in the acceleration of their trends (“exponential”), just looking at 1960 through 2023 we see that, per National Center for Family & Marriage Research:

The estimated median age at first birth has increased by five years from 1960 to 2023. In 1960, it was 22. In 1990, it increased to 24 and by 2023, it stood at 27.

There are truckloads of data out there painting an even more unsettling trend than these quick data dumps can account for. Do the research. People are delaying having children and aquiring property. And not by just a little, but by a lot. Meaninglessness, purposelessness, vanity, is settling in. The idea of legacy, being remembered, having an impact in your world, is fading.

Recently Charles Hugh Smith, a modern day Great Thinker, published an article titled, “Is AI A Catalyst For Growth... Or For Collapse?”

One conclusion he reaches is this: “…AI is the ultimate projection of disruptive technology, but there are no guarantees that its consequences won’t catalyze systemic collapse.”

But our inevitable embrace of AI and depending on the promises of its creators will be catatrophic. The camel is all the way in the tent now, and he doesn’t back up. This technology has progressed faster than we can catch up to it to slow it down.

The mantra was once, “Go West, Young Man!”

I don’t know what to tell them now.

Snoopy.

I mean, does ANYONE not like Snoopy? Could that even be up for debate?

Either way, I think there’s another point around which we can all rally… both sides of the aisle, both ends of the spectrum, Nose-Ring-Blue-Hairs and Reagan-Kirk-Conservatives alike… and it’s about “learning.” Because nobody thinks that

A. Learning is bad

B. We should stop doing it

Therefore, let’s start at that point. Then we can follow the dystopian snake and see where it takes us next. We can still disagree about WHAT we’re learning… this time I’m just talking about “LEARNING” in and of itself. That is,

“Cognitively Internalizing Those Things Which Makes Life Better or Worse and Choosing The Things, Largely, That Make Life Better.”

I think everyone can agree that learning is important. It’s what makes us not touch a hot stove [hopefully] more than once (clichéd, I know,). Learning, along with the scale of time, is what more than anything else that which defines maturity.

“Learning” is embodied in the phrase, “And then, what?”

“And then, what” separates the mature from the immature. It shows, more than anything else, a person’s propensity to see beyond the immediate and look to the consequence. When you touch the clichéd hot stove, you immediately learn, “and then, what.” The next time you encounter a hot stove, “and then, what” is the thing keeping you from touching it again.

It is this infinitely repeated series of trials and errors, embedding “and then, what” deep into our ethos, that makes us the individual we turn out to be. It’s where we get our personality, our character, our tendencies and our foibles. It’s how we know what we are good at. And not so good at. It’s how leaders learn to lead, and followers figure out they are better off just following.

So what if we cut off that learning loop forever? Made a short circuit? What if “learning” went extinct? What if the failures, read; the pains, of learning were no more? What if, relatively speaking: all of a sudden, everything became more about the answer and not so much the learning?

What would happen then?

It turns out we won’t have to wait AT ALL! Because we are here. Dystopia has already begun. Welcome to the machine.

For millennia, humankind learned through process. If we had a question, we set out to find the answer. In doing so we tried some things, failed, then tried other things. Sometimes failing meant pain; Not always physical pain; sometimes just the innate realization at having pursued an idea down a seemingly endless path, only to find out it did end… and you spent time, effort and thought to discover that the end was of no use to the pursuit of the answer. Disappointment is pain. Expending energy is pain. Thinking is pain. Honesty is pain. Intellectual endeavor is PAIN! OW!

But through it all, we learned. We learned what NOT to do. Then we tried something else. Since time began, humankind followed this process in the pursuit of answers. Strangely, we often discovered, it turned out after all that the answer to the original question was never the point, AND THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART:

It has always been the search rather than the answer that has produced the greater long-term utility. The Most Useful part of the endeavor. Having arrived at an answer, one that “worked…” …Upon reflection, it always has ended up that getting there was WAY more than half the fun. The journey, it turns out, was the point.

Learning, by definition, brings about pain. And pain solidifies in our hearts and minds all of the elements that brought that pain about, eventually revealing the truth we sought at the very beginning.

I recently read an example of this that involved the methods by which college students engaged in their studies in Ancient Days, back in the 1980s and 90s.

We’re talking WAY back.

We (truth bomb… we’re now talking about me...) would be given an assignment by our instructors, i.e. a “question” that needed to be answered. We then “went,” (that is, actually moved our personage from one place to another) to the library. We set pencil to paper and created an outline that sort of fleshed out the journey towards the holy grail, the answer to the assigned question. Once we mapped the route that seemed the most efficient, we proceeded to the card catalogue, using key words we had teased out of the assignment in conjunction with what we had learned thus far in class, and began to chase down materials in the library that might help us in our quest. Some materials were in the form of books, some were periodicals, some microfiche and some might have even been in video form. We then “went,” (there’s that word again) to the shelves, or “open stacks” and physically removed books and magazines from their specific location and carried (see: “went”) them back to tables where we would spend countless hours poring through the material looking for clues that might help us in our search for the answer to the assigned question.

I know reading this account is laborious for you but imagine doing what I’m describing. It was hard. It hurt. It burned calories and created discomfort. Many paths were chased that yeilded nothing apart from the chase itself. There was frustration.

But something else happened as well; the pursuit brought forth unintended consequences:

• We stumbled across things we didn’t know and didn’t know we wanted to know.

• We worked muscles that were often neglected, activated brain cells that had forgotten about themselves

• We spent time with friends chucking and jiving and comparing notes and making fun of the nerd who finished his paper the day after it was assigned

• We pushed ourselves, so that when we were finished the assignment, everything “after” seemed like summer vacation. At least for a day or two.

• We failed. A lot. And learned what not to do again.

• And often we succeeded. Many of us even met the love of their lives while studying in the library, searching for a completely unrelated answer.

Here’s a thing: Once, as a high-schooler, I was in the school library embarking on a journey very much like that which I’m describing here, when I stumbled upon, completely unrelated to the work I was there to do, “The Fountainhead,” by Ayn Rand. So intrigued was I by a book of that girth and mass that I took it down and started reading it, just to see how one would begin WRITING a book of that magnitude… Reading and walking, I carried the book clean past the checkout desk and didn’t put it down until I had finished it months later. And I was changed for life. Next came “Anthem,” then “Atlas Shrugged,” and before I knew it I was an economist. Who knew?

And That. Is. The point. “Who knows?” what will come of the endeavor, that of learning and the pains and victories that come with it? It’s almost as though we should be happy when faced with various trials that refine and perfect us through the mechanism of learning. Perhaps we should even go so far as “Counting it as Pure Joy!”

Just a thought.

So, about “Artificial Intelligence.” It’s not my intention at this point to mince or parse. Is “AI” “I?” Or just “A"?” Either? Neither? I’m not interested, at least for the purposes of this particular essay. There are other relevant and salient facets we can explore soon… today I am only interested in looking at A Thing That’s Happening through the existence, persistence and ever-present convenience through that which we CALL “AI.” The title of this piece is “The Extinction of Learning,” and that’s what I’m watching happen in real time.

Through the utilization of that which we call “AI,” we are systematically eliminating the process I arduously described 5 paragraphs ago. As an instructor of college students I have watched over the past four years as the process we call “learning” has been, first, reduced, by the advent of the internet and search engines, and most recently eliminated by the advent of Artificial Intelligence agents which instantly feed you answers to any questions you might pose.

There is no longer The Search. The Quest. The Adventure… and certainly there is no longer any pain which might serve to remind us of what and what not to do. We are assigned by an instructor a question that is to be answered, and instead of embarking on A Quest, we type the question in our laptop and hit “Enter.”

KA-ZING! Instant answer! As if that were the point. Well, we didn’t learn anything, but we got an “A.” We didn’t meet up with friends, we didn’t have to read or absorb, we didn’t have to pore over volumes and accidentally glean some deeper meaning from the assignment… We didn’t… DO… anything. We didn’t… GO… anywhere.

We just clicked. And we learned nothing.

Be very careful. The threat of AI isn’t what it might become or do in the future. The threat is here: it is destroying the human endeavor. No Pain Allowed, at least not for now…

The real pain is yet to come. Learning postponed is pain multiplied. Equilibrium, the cosmos’ strongest force, always has its way, with or without the merciful and gracious influence of discomfort.

Never stop learning. No matter how bad it hurts. You’ll win in the end.

Not to mention controversial. This may be the most important thing, aside from my personal salvation, that I have pondered during my stay here on Dirtball-Three.

My readers here and everywhere will see me coming a mile away when there is a controversy circulating around Artificial Intelligence and its utility, particularly: to, with, for, and at, students of every age. As The Great Rush Limbaugh once famously said, “If you are using a product for free, then you ARE the product.”

Artificial Intelligence, thus far, is the greatest real-time example of this principal we have. We are literally training AI to replace us, and much faster than ever thought possible. I’m old enough to remember four years ago when AI wasn’t even a “thing,” at least for the typical end-user.

This end-user, it turns out, is training AI, and badly. In fact, we are turning the entire internet into slop. (Take the ten or so minutes to watch this. This is important.)

An article found in a multitude of online news sources, but most notably in Time Magazine’s website, refers to a study recently done by MIT called “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task”

I have read several versions of analysis regarding this article, and most of them repeated the same basic points: Yes. Using OpenAI, ChatGPT and other online large language models (LLM) does, it seems, (for all practical purposes) make those who use them exclusively for cut-and-paste purposes, demonstrably stupider. (More stupid? Less smart? Un-smarter? Cognitively challenged?) I had suspected as much. So there.

BUT, thanks to this substack, I was forced to: be intellectually honest and avoid confirmation bias by actually going forth and summoning the actual MIT study... the one so frequently quoted... and ascertain for myself if the reporting on this study was faithful to the truth.

And so I chose, at random, Time Magazine’s reporting on the study, to critique for accuracy and fidelity. After reading (almost... it’s a very, very long and thorough paper) all of the actual published account from MIT (link provided above) I have determined that surprisingly, the Time article was very true to the facts.

As far as “...reporting all results” is concerned, well, NO... Time couldn’t possibly do this, as the layman would drown in the (important) minutia and never finish the article. However, as far as accurately reflecting the information in the study’s abstract and discussion there was absolutely zero bias and misdirection that I could find. And I’m not a fan of Time Magazine. Time even discused the study’s limitations: for example, the fact that it [the study] was released almost immediately upon completion, PRIOR to peer review, because the author of the study felt so strongly that the results needed to be ingested by the educational community as soon as possible. There is, she suggested, too much at stake to delay her findings. This is consistent with her conviction as written in the original study. It was also noted that the study had a relatively small sample size and that this could be an issue for the time being. Additionally it was pointed out that longitudinal studies would definitely, especially with this subject, be crucial to furthering her results.

Standby. More to come soon. I’m finally ready to do this.

Mike Sulhoff

And, here we are; celebrating on the morning after the day I predicted would be the darkest in modern history.

When I’m wrong, I’m wrong BIG! And boy, do I love being wrong in the right way.

I made several mistakes, made wrong assumptions. My spiritual and worldview have been rocked. I am happy. This morning was like waking up on Christmas.

First, and most importantly, let’s get this part out of the way: I completely missed the significance of Donald Trump’s apparent and obvious repentance. Over the past couple of years, when churches and Christian communities wanted to gather and pray for our country, I rejected the effectiveness of any such endeavor.

I stand by my premise: God has never, as far as I can tell, blessed a sinful nation without seeing sincere repentance on the part of the leadership. As we Christians stood and looked around wondering how we got to this dismal point, (another story in itself), praying seemed the intuitively logical approach. But it always seemed pointless to me as I observed the blatant, unrepentant wickedness of our leadership. Why would this time be different? Why would God bless a nation whose leadership intends to drive the other direction and a populace who seems intent on encouraging it? And so we were; doomed to our self-imposed fate, the reaping following the sewing.

It seems, though, that something happened after COVID-19 and the election of 2020, to those Americans who truly desire God and His righteousness. There was an awakening of sorts, and this, too, is material for further discussion. But the result was a quickening at a spiritual level far beyond the pedantic politic; We realized, finally, that these newly-awakened screaming demons weren’t up for a game of pat-a-cake… they truly wanted to drag the spirit of America, the spirit that had saved the world so many times in uncountable ways, straight to hell. And something, miraculously, was awakened.

I was opposed to Donald Trump running again. A devout Black-Pill-Swallower, I thought, “Let it go.” “Stick a fork in it; we’re through.” Interestingly, God, it seemed, had different plans.

We as Christians had our parts to play, too, and fortunately, Trump embraced his, despite the pearls of contrarian wisdom I willingly disseminated to anyone who would bear the burden of listening.

I’ve never found Trump to be an attractive person, neither in countenance, physique, manner, or presence. I still, today, find him annoying as hell. But God uses despite, not because, lest we should boast. And I’ll give you: annoying as Trump may be, he does do some things very, very well. Apparently, God uses annoying people, too.

I should know that better than anyone.

Anyway, Trump got shot. Technically, in the head. And he lived to tell about it. Several things happened that day. As far as I was concerned, I, as did millions of other American Believers, saw a truly rare thing: I saw innate courage. Jumping to one's feet, directly into the line of fire, and yelling, “FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT!” is not something learned or practiced. That is something innate. You either are that man or you are not. It’s in your DNA. You don’t work on being that way, you just ARE. And when it appeared that Donald Trump was that man, I, for one, took notice because this was a different thing, altogether… This was superhero-level stuff, where “annoying” mattered about as much as a fly matters to an elephant. So there was THAT…

But as I watched, I saw a different Donald Trump emerge from the experience. (The significance of which was re-emphasized as we discovered there had been yet ANOTHER subsequent attempt on his life…) This Donald Trump seemed humbled by several degrees. He seemed more in touch with not only his mortality, but also his Creator. This by more than rhetoric; Trump deliberately and boldly began pronouncing the sovereignty of God and the Lordship Of Jesus. What a powerful sound, the sound of that name! Especially when spoken unapologetically by a world leader! It’s a physical sensation, is it not? You can FEEL it down to your CORE. When a leader of Trump's stature says the name “JESUS” in a way that is not academic, but personal in a humble and real sense, I believe inanimate things stand up and take notice. You can almost feel the universe begin to re-order itself.

I get chills just writing about it.

So that, it seems, is what happened… Our leader got right with God. And it appears that today, November 6, 2024, God has blessed our nation against otherwise insurmountable odds. Immeasurable and impossibly complex variables were arranged and conspired to create a real and provable miracle.

Am I the only one who woke up this morning and said to himself, “Oh, yes…THIS is what hope feels like! I remember, now!” Because I had truly forgotten. It’s not that I had forgotten “hope” in the spiritual sense. No, happily I never find myself there… but I truly HAD forgotten “hope” in the material sense. I wasn’t making plans for adding on to the house! I wasn’t thinking about grandchildren! I wasn’t even sure if I’d be doing any Christmas shopping!

What an interesting feeling, this notion of “hope!” I gradually realized how long it had been since I felt it! Hope hadn’t diminished all at once; it took years to fade. But I don’t think I realized the depth of hopelessness I had existed in until I came to terms, this morning, with the understanding that God had truly blessed our country because our leadership repented. I was the frog, and hopelessness was the temperature of the water. I think I speak for many.

For me, Hope is back. How wonderful.

But here’s another observation I’d like to make today: Was “Competent Evil” defeated, or was evil simply incompetent?

In other words, in the parlance of our time, are these people as stupid as they seem, or are they supervillains who simply got owned?

The famous statement goes, “Never attribute to malice that which is more easily explained through stupidity.” Or something like that. You get the picture. I had bypassed the option of choosing “stupidity” when I came to the conclusion that there wasn’t enough stupid in the known universe to explain some of the things I was seeing go down: The withdrawal from Afghanistan; the idea that boys can become girls, and vice-versa; drag shows for toddlers; the normalization of pedophilia; allowing unvetted terrorists to settle comfortably in our country, unmonitored; abandoning merit in favor of equity and diversity (at NASA???); adopting the premise that truth doesn’t exist; Picking Waltz as a running mate? Really??

Obviously, I could go on. You see my point. Is there, truly, THAT MUCH stupidity in the universe, let alone, the world? I would argue, “NO.” It’s easy to understand why I would conclude that Competent Evil was having its way. It always got everything it wanted.

Then the election happened. I, like so many others, was absolutely confident that the fix was in. That the Competent Evil had pre-arranged a path that ensured final and fatal victory.

But that’s not what happened. What happened was that good happened. Under the perceived circumstances, by way of the premise that God had left us unto ourselves, how could THIS happening have happened? Was what we assumed to be evil, actually stupid? Does it turn out there really IS that much stupid out there?

Having spoken with my wife this morning, I opened my mind to yet another miracle that may have, well, HAPPENED… Was this force, this entity, really what we thought it was? Was it really, truly, Competent Evil?

And if so, was it… defeated last night?

My hands shake as I type.

This time IS different:

Watch what can happen….

https://x.com/LisaMarieBoothe/status/1854076971883360461

Because these are not only the times that try men’s souls. These are the events that define the course of history and SAVE men’s souls. You simply cannot ignore the effects of this election. The future has been rewritten, and now, we find hope. We didn’t, and now we do. What is that, if not a miracle?

And speaking of miracles, it turns out God is good at them. The election was destined to be an embattled, razor-thin, controversial, contested, and horrifically violent event.

And God, yes, God, made it a landslide. Almost Reaganesque. Not quite, but almost… At the time of writing, the potential electoral count gives Trump 309 votes. Therefore Miracle Number ONE, the electoral college win, is historic; but this wouldn’t be enough, because the pundits would be decrying the injustice of the electoral college, that old, dated, dilapidated, twisted abuse of “Democracy ©.”

But because Miracle Number TWO, the popular vote, speaks decisively to the “Democratic ©” measure of popular sentiment, the insane anti-electoral college narrative has been wrested from their greasy little hands. Trump is currently ahead by 4.9 MILLION votes. That’s over 3% of the voting population.

So Trump won. Even the elegant, lovely, and gracious ladies (/sarc) on “The View” have openly admitted so. I know, because I watched. I did that for YOU, dear reader. You are welcome.

But let’s not forget Miracle Number THREE, the balance of power in the Senate. Right now, late Wednesday morning, Republicans hold the majority in the Senate with 52 seats. There remain five undetermined at this point, but the assumption is that most of them will also go to the Republicans. IF THIS IS THE CASE, and, with the current flood of miracles, I have no reason to doubt that it is, then President Trump will have no difficulties at all in selecting his cabinet and the over 3,000 executive positions he is responsible for appointing. Obviously, we’ve come to expect quite a lot of incompetence from a Republican Senate that seems, at times, determined to lose, but in the spirit of the current flood of wonderfulness, I am going to assume that this, too, will end happily for those who crave Truth, Justice, and The American Way.

Don’t relax. Evil is still out there, waiting for defenses to drop. And we must still pay for our malfeasance. The dollar must still collapse, and our debt must be defaulted on. The bond market will be toast. The stock bubble is epic. WW3 is still at our front door, banging, not knocking.

But… who saw this coming? Drowning in miracles the day after what has been probably the most divisive and hotly contested election in US history.

Because ONE MAN… one man… chose to follow God.

“Follow God or sing the blues; I wonder who began it?

Don’t ask me. I’m only visiting this planet.”

-Larry Norman

Sometimes I love being wrong.

I was thinking back to a remodeling company’s box truck I saw years ago.  I don’t know what made me remember it.  Or what outfit it belonged to.   But I do recall the tagline on the rear roll-up door, emblazoned with a high-resolution full-color photo of a modern, state-of-the-art kitchen:

More on this in a minute.

The universally agreed-upon baseline description of behavior is really easy:  We do things more if they are rewarded, and less if they are punished.  Makes sense.  To keep doing things that are followed by some form of punishment would be self-destructive, and we wouldn’t be a species anymore.  Do things more when they are followed by reward and we survive; proliferate, even.  Prosper. 

So what is “reward?”  Certainly, it’s subjective; to me, a reward would NOT be an all-expense paid weekend at a quilting bee in Sheboygan.  But it might prove motivational to my mom.  Diff’rent strokes.  For me, then, to pursue that which is rewarding, or any endeavor that provides long-term security, satisfaction, and sustenance for me and my tiny portable environment, (life)… is adaptive and therefore beneficial.  I get to live longer.  And so will Mom.

Where it gets a LITTLE tricksy, (not a lot, I promise) is when you realize that “reward” can take on a total of TWO (2) forms: it can be the subsequent presentation of a subjectively GOOD thing, or the departure, or removal, of a BAD thing.  Either outcome will encourage a behavior and ensure that it continues. 

Thus, the opposite can be said about punishment; punishment can either be the presentation of a BAD thing, or the removal of a GOOD thing, and again, these terms are highly subjective! 

Diff’rent strokes.

So, isn’t this, in large part, (maybe the largest part,) a significant component of who we are, as individuals?

Mom’s a quilter.  I am not. 

I like vintage home audio.  Mom does not.

These are the things that motivate us, define us, and help us gravitate toward like-minded people.  But this essay is about depravity.  Where does depravity fit in?  C’MON, MAN!

It was long ago discovered and established that often people will act in ways that, at first glance, appear to be irrational.  Many are happy to stop there and conclude that irrationality is a thing.  I would submit that it is NOT.  I would suggest that what may appear to be “irrational” speaks to the avoidance of an uncomfortable truth, this being that many are motivated by things that we as a species would rather not think of as “rewards.”

“Schadenfreude” refers to our human tendency to derive satisfaction when bad things happen to bad people; i.e. child molesters tend to do poorly in prisons, and to that I say, “GOOD!”

But what would we call a human tendency to derive satisfaction (and therefore consider it a reward) when bad things happen to “GOOD” (in heavy scare quotes…) people?  May we possibly call this tendency “Depravity?” (capital “D”)

I think I can argue such, and thus condemn all of humanity in one fell swoop.  A tall order, but let me try.

Back to “irrationality.”  (wearing out the “quotes” buttons today) 

Experiments have been replicated time and again (I’ve done this myself) wherein a group of students was given an amount of money, theirs to keep.  A different group of students, known by the first group, was also given a sum of money but relatively, substantially, more.  Let’s call it ten dollars and 100 dollars.  Get this:  When those who were given the lesser sum were provided the opportunity to lose one dollar if it would cost the “wealthier” students ten dollars, a majority of those students embraced the opportunity!

“But,” you say, “this is irrational!  Why would the first group voluntarily lose money if there was no reward or motivation to do so?”  The answer is, to me, horrifying:  by spending a dollar, they were able, then, to reduce the disparity between them and the “richer” students substantially.  By more than 10%, even.  This reduced the intangible (but very real) amount of envy the “poorer” students had to endure.  Envy is uncomfortable.  Having a portion of it reduced is rewarding.  Thus, the “irrational” behavior.

Terrified yet?  Because I’m talking about US… …humans…  You.  Your neighbors.  Your family.  All of us.  US.

So back to the remodeling truck and its kitschy tagline,

It turns out that Envy is a, a whatdyacallit, a “DEADLY SIN.”  One of seven, apparently, (and not one to be envied.)

That well-heeled $100,000 remodeling box truck I mentioned was selling kitchens by ensuring that if you hired them and gave them money, not only would you receive the benefit of a stylish, efficient, tasteful new kitchen, but also, YOU WOULD BE PLACING THOSE YOU ARE COMMANDED TO LOVE AND CARE FOR (your neighbor) IN A POSITION WHERE THEY WERE, HOPEFULLY, CAPTIVE TO A DEADLY SIN!

And, so, this was the motivation offered by the clearly profitable remodeling company:  “Hire us, and we will ensure that your neighbors not only won’t have what you do have, but they will also be compromising their very soul wishing that they did!!”

This incentive, this carrot, this promise, was clearly effective.  (which, as it turns out, was the motivation for putting that tagline on the back of the truck in the first place.)

What does this say about us?

We will spend money to hurt good people by ensuring: that the disparity of our virtues, or our presumed wealth, is greater, (and this is important) in our favor.  For the sake of the argument, we can dispense with the material benefit of a nicer kitchen for ourselves; that’s already baked into the cake.  It is presumed.  The metric nobody saw coming was the relative increase in disparities between us vs them, with them on the losing side.  Not only with a lesser kitchen but perhaps, more importantly, with lesser virtue.

It appears that we aren’t content to receive the benefit of reward in the traditional sense: good things coming our way…  Something inside us isn’t satisfied with that, as long as there are other disparities between US and THEM that we can change in our favor depending on the situation.

Finally, (and I’ll let you go after this) what does this say about our social structure, one where those with the least to lose can, with a vote, reduce the amount of disparity between them and those who have the most to lose?  If they can, legally, spend a dollar if it will cost the others ten dollars, where does that put us after a time?  Do we move up? Or down?  Or do the disparities exacerbate wherein there are just those at the top who can leverage their position in order to stay there, and those at the bottom who can leverage the middle to bring them down to their level?

What happens to the middle?  Is this sounding familiar? 

This has never ended well.  It’s probably too late to change it now. 

“Ever since the fall of man, things have been tough all over…”

Robin Williams, “The Best of Times”

Or you watch somebody miss it.

And it’s even worse if it matters.  Like last night’s debate mattered.  I felt like I watched an airplane crash into a mountain simply because the pilot missed “PULL UP day” in flight school.  Catastrophe was so expensive, and avoiding it was so cheap.

Watching as the “debate” slogged on, I felt like everyone else; this was a dogpile.  Trump was buried under three opposing, like-minded conspirators who completely pulled the rug out from under him and presented it as a gift to Harris.  “Fair” didn’t even get an intro.  The deck was so clearly stacked against Trump going into this meat grinder that it was impossible to hide it, which leads me to Trump’s first, and possibly most costly mistake:

In my opinion, he needed to call them on it, the second the debilitating bias showed its slimy head, appropriately, regarding the topic of abortion.  Trump concluded his statement regarding his position on abortion with a response that was not all bad, I’ll grant.  It was then that the lovely and gracious Ms. Davis helpfully (to Harris) pointed out,

“There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it's born. Madam Vice President, I want to get your response to President Trump.”

First of all, I, like everyone else, hollered.  And it wasn’t PG-rated hollering.  What was this we were watching??  Then I waited with eager anticipation… Surely Trump wasn’t going to let the nose of THAT camel into the tent… surely… not….

I was hoping beyond all hope that he would nip it in the bud; I so desperately wanted him to come out of the chute with, “First of all, Ms. Davis, I was under the impression that I was to be debating Ms. HARRIS tonight, not ABC News…”

But he didn’t.  He didn’t call them on it, thus granting permission.  Silence implies consent.  And so the dogpile continued, again, and again, and again.  Until there were memes, even before the debate was over.  That’s how obviously egregious this was to the viewing public. 

Soon the camel had wriggled its big, smelly, self all the way into the tent, and the stage was set.  This was clearly, at best, three against one.  This doesn’t seem terribly fair, not really, not to anybody.  If they’d dogpiled Harris, I would have felt the same consternation, if not rage: if I’m going to win, I want it to be a FAIR win.  I don’t want help.  I don’t need your help.  And if I lose, it will be because of my lack of regard for the seriousness of the matter.  I should have studied more, studied harder, studied longer.  I should have known the facts, the data points, and the metrics.  I should have at LEAST known loose ratios.

Pretty much ANYTHING is better than:

“I got the oil business going like nobody has ever done before.” (Wait.  NOBODY?  EVER?  By what metric?  And what, exactly, does “going” mean?)

“I would have been five times, four times, five times higher…” (This doesn’t convey confidence, exactly.)

“…the prices of energy were quadrupling and doubling…” (Sounds like it getting better, then?)

“…people being killed by the millions. It's the millions.”  (“Millions” can address a number anywhere from One Million to One Billion.  Where abouts are we talking here?)

“We're playing with World War 3.” ( We all know this is true, but it is such a bold-and-antithetical statement to what pop-culture believes, we really should be shown some clear evidence here.)

“She has a plan to confiscate everybody's gun.” (At face value this sounds libelous, if not true, which we all know it is.  A few more details here would hugely bolster this amazingly [seemingly] pejorative statement.)

“She goes down as the worst vice president in the history of our country.”  (Why, approximately?  Maybe just a couple of metrics describing this failure.  This is easy.  They’re everywhere.)

“We would have been out [of Afghanistan] faster than them, but we wouldn't have lost the soldiers. We wouldn't have left many Americans behind.”  (Here it would have been extremely helpful to just mention a COUPLE things he would have done differently…)

“She hates Israel” (particularly bad statement, as the “moderators,” rightly so, immediately asked Harris if this was “true…”) For Trump to send home a message like this, (a message, by all accounts, which actually IS true,) HE MUST BRING THE RECEIPTS!

More on the idea of receipts later.

But there were yet a couple other examples of the benefits of not missing “PULL UP” day in flight school: 

When confronted with the “Is Kamala BLACK?” issue, Trump was unwittingly set up to execute a SLAM DUNK for the ages!  And all of us watching knew it.  Every. Single. ONE. of us was shouting at the TV screen… “THEY’RE THE ONES WHO MADE SUCH A BIG DEAL ABOUT OUR REVOLUTIONARY NEW-AND-IMPROVED MULTI-INTERSECTIONAL MULTI-CULTURAL DIVERSE VICE PRESIDENT!!!”

What did we get?  Beware: actual quote coming up next:

“I don't. And I don't care. I don't care what she is. I don't care. You make a big deal out of something. I couldn't care less. Whatever she wants to be is okay with me…  I don't know. I don't know. All I can say is I read where she was not Black, that she put out. And, I'll say that. And then I read that she was black. And that's okay. Either one was okay with me. That's up to her. That's up to her.”

At least he said “I COULDN’T care less” rather then “I COULD care less.”  Points for accuracy and for avoiding pop-culture stupidity.

But I promised you two benefits of not missing “PULL UP” day.  Here’s the second one:

Ms. Harris set herself up like a bowling pin.  The lowest of hanging fruit.  The mentally-challenged (retarded?) six-year-old ASKING to be punched in the face.  And what ever other crude and (in)appropriate metaphors you can think of…

Again, actual quote by Ms. Harris:

“…access to health care should be a right…”

The response to this horrific statement should not only a no-brainer, but, more importantly, the appropriate response is unrealized by most voting Americans (and certainly the voting NON-Americans.)

“FIRST OF ALL, MS. HARRIS, ANYTHING THAT MUST BE PAID FOR BY SOMEONE ELSE CANNOT BE CONSIDERED A “RIGHT” FOR ANOTHER.”

Missing this response was, to me, political malpractice.  This is the ideology that is ushering in, literally, every boondoggle low-information-voter’s spending bill in existence today.  THIS slippery slope goes all the way to the bottom.  Venezuela-style.  Health care is a “right?”  Why, because people NEED it??  Well, people need food, housing, transportation, jobs, communication, internet, affection, comradery, and, most of all, a PS2 in every mom’s basement. 

This is the touchstone, the baseline, the benchmark for every single progressive left-wing proposal ever made, and it is the premise behind all Marxist thinking. 

WHAT AN OPPORTUNITY!  MISSED!  THE MOUNTAIN WINS AGAIN!

Let me reiterate something I mentioned earlier, because it is important.  Maybe it’s the point of this little piece I’m pounding out on my poor, defenseless keyboard…

You HAVE to bring RECEIPTS!

You’re a toothless, ineffective, annoying, all-hat-and-no-cattle blithering noise maker without them.  And here’s the thing… to bring receipts, you have to study.  You have to care.  You have to GO TO TROUBLE.  You must realize the gravity of the stakes and work tirelessly to be effective at decimating the opposition.  You do this with confidence and facts.  Both of those elements require tireless preparation and study.

Trump brought neither.

You know who does work tirelessly to provide us with both? J.D Vance.  He could have turned Harris into a quivering blob of goo last night, with the moderators chuckling and shaking his hand at the end.  (well, maybe not the last part.)  Because he is prepared, well-versed, knowledgeable, practiced and thus comes across as eloquent and convincing.

Exhibit one:

https://x.com/ACTBrigitte/status/1833712891079356696

Exhibit two:

https://x.com/DefiyantlyFree/status/1833716822723719215

Trump could do this if he wanted to.  He’s really, really, smart.  You don’t become a multizillionaire by blathering broad generalities at everyone.

And so, finally, I felt betrayed last night.  Not an overstatement. Alone in the wilderness of a post-modern progressive living hell. Initially, I wrote,

“I'm sorry...... Trump, God love him, is the worst debater I have ever seen.  This is painful.  His answers have been infantile...”

A few minutes later I posited,

“I know my analysis is unpopular, but he completely blew it.  Granted, the moderation has him in their cross hairs, but he even missed THAT opportunity.  He should have looked [Davis] straight in the eye and said, "am I debating you or Ms. Harris?!"  ABC was criminal”

Finally, after further painful reflection, I concluded this:

“...he could have studied.  He could have had data. And facts. And stats. And strategy. And vision. Sigh.  That was so damn hard to watch.  The more I think about it the angrier I get. Trump didn't even study.  He didn't prepare at all.  He had zero grasp of facts.  He spoke in long-winded generalities, and in circles at that.  This is TOO DAMN IMPORTANT TO BLOW OFF LIKE IT'S A BASKET-WEAVING MID-TERM!  I feel cast aside, disregarded, and unimportant.  An afterthought.  Betrayed.  Does he really think that he's so good that he doesn't even have to TRY??  INFURIATING! 😡”

And this is where I am today.  Will there be another debate for Trump to have the opportunity to demonstrate his keen dialectic prowess?  Probably not.  I doubt Harris would agree to a Fox debate, and unless the GOP is actively TRYING to lose the presidency (yes, I went there…) then there will be no CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC et al debates.

Don’t ever miss “PULL UP” day.  “PULL UP” day is important.  If not for you, it most certainly is for your passengers.

The past week has been crazy trying to keep up with what all is going on in this global devolution. What I wish to address quickly today is in response to the question, "What's the urgency?" "Why now?"

There are a great many good answers to this question, so this isn’t an unreasonable one. We can focus mainly, for the moment, on economics. But that is just one indicator of the shrinking timeline and increasing urgency.

Keep in mind that I might be wrong. If that is the case, then that is just fine by me. But I would rather make a "type-one" error (assuming something IS when it MIGHT NOT BE,) than a "type-two" error (assuming something ISN'T when it MIGHT BE.) In this case, it is the safer of the two errors one can make. If I'm right, then I will be "ready," or, at least as ready as a person can be. If I am wrong, then I will at least simply have a store of resources safely put aside, and I will be prepared to defend myself from harmful natural events when they come to pass.

Also keep in mind that this is WAY oversimplified for the purpose of brevity.  But it doesn’t make it any less true or relevant.

To begin with, I submit that the United States has used up all its goodwill and destroyed any and all confidence in the US Dollar. The USD has been the world's reserve currency since 1945. We have broken trust with the world several times since then incrementally when we started printing more dollars than we could back with gold, then, suddenly, when we went off the gold standard officially in 1972, and just last year when we weaponized our status by seizing dollar-denominated assets from Russians at the onset of the war in Ukraine. This became a clear and present danger that every other country with dollar-denominated assets paid very close attention to. If we did it to the Russians, we could certainly do it to the Saudis, who decided to, suddenly, normalize relations with Iran, much to our chagrin... This is why they abruptly announced, a couple of weeks ago, that they would begin accepting payments for oil in non-USD currencies. (Chinese Yuan/Renminbi, Russian Rubles, Indian Rupees, etc.)

This is a huge deal. We can discuss why in another post or forum, but understand that the rate of trend towards de-dollarization is increasing now on a practically HOURLY basis... When this reaches a certain point, the US economy will be sacked. Finished. Emasculated. Pointless. It will be so bad we won't have to worry about martial law because the enforcers will be too busy trying to protect THEIR personal interests. A truckload of twenties won't buy a family a single meal.

We are, right now, anywhere from hours to maybe a couple of months away from that reality. Don't listen to the otherwise smart people who say this can't happen; it can, will, and IS happening. Closing your eyes doesn't make it stop.

This brings us to the REALLY bad news: we can't do a thing about it. If we cut federal spending to the bone (HA!) balanced the budget, (HA HA!), and promised to be good as a choirboy it wouldn't change a thing at this point; we owe too much to unwind it. All we can do now is start up the printing presses and keep printing dollars to cover the interest on our current debt until hyperinflation takes out what's left of us.

The banks are failing. They are over-leveraged to the tune of multi-QUADRILLION dollars. When they fail en mass, the fed will swoop in with a digital currency (CBDC, already started 7 days ago as "FedNow") and mandate that as the only legal way to trade. This is what the SD HB1193 was all about, paving the way for unfettered control of the Federal Reserve over every single US citizen. This bill was fortunately vetoed by Noem, but that will be a temporary fix... when other states DO adopt this UCC change, SD will be economically isolated from them. SD citizens won't even be able to TRAVEL through them, because they will have to buy fuel somehow.

Two states have already seen the handwriting on the wall, Florida and Texas. Florida is trying to ban the use of CBDC in the state altogether and Texas is attempting to start up its own sovereign currency.

This is ONE reason for "Why Now?"

Now, to address Larry Kudlow’s recent proclamation that the demise of the US Dollar is not only unlikely but practically impossible…  (see video here: https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/larry-kudlow-its-incumbent-us-maintain-reserve-currency-status-dollar )

I like Kudlow for the most part.  I think he is mistaken in the first part of his thesis, that of the unthinkable possibility of rapid and certain de-dollarization.  His assumption is based on the sheer volume of dollars being traded globally, but he doesn't seem to address the fact that this volume is dropping quickly and the confidence in the USD is decreasing by the day. 

When Biden put sanctions on Russia a year ago it kick-started a move away from the USD, mainly because we demonstrated our willingness to weaponize our reserve currency status against people we didn't like.  Also, Russia is the world's leader in available resources to sell.  They simply found other markets and started doing business in Rubles instead of dollars.  When the Saudis disconnected the dollar from oil, that was the big one. 

Energy is everything.  Now the problem is that with the de-dollarization that has begun to happen, this alone precipitates MORE de-dollarization.  This is because of capital markets where countries invest their payments from other countries in the other countries themselves; either by buying equities or bonds.  When countries begin doing that, it increases the values and consequent confidence in these markets AWAY from the US capital markets.  It becomes a self-perpetuating increase in flight away from the US markets and towards competing markets in other countries. 

This can happen very quickly. 

We are already seeing it happen. 

It's only a matter of time. 

The number of countries now willing to trade in alternate or emerging currencies is increasing by the day. 

Life was filled with guns and war
And everyone got trampled on the floor
I wish we'd all been ready
Children died, the days grew cold
A piece of bread could buy a bag of gold
I wish we'd all been ready
There's no time to change your mind
The Son has come and you've been left behind

-Larry Norman, 1969

“The fist seemed to get bigger and bigger, the closer it got to my face…

…and then it hit me!”

This morning I was just sitting around, minding my own business, offending nobody at the time, as I am wont to do… I was thinking about the aggregate of “things” happening, not just in my own country, but in the whole world, right now, all at once.

Russia; Russia and China; Russia and Western Europe; Russia and Ukraine; Ukraine and the U.S.; China and Russia and the U.S.; China and Russia and the U.S. and Ukraine; China and Taiwan; China and Taiwan and the U.S.; North Korea; Iran; Iraq and China; Western Europe and energy; Western Europe and food; The U.S. Dollar and the World; The U.S. and supply chains; Russia and North Korea testing ICBMs; China spy balloons; U.S. Congressmen sleeping with Chinese spies; Church apostasy; Earthquake swarms; Fires; Famine; Train wrecks; Energy destruction; Truth manipulation; Child abuse; Epidemic; Endemic; Euthanasia; Genocide; Civil decay; Family decay; Education decay; Moral decay; Faith decay; Global corruption; Reverse racism; Sexual depravity; Rise of Marxism; Equity-based policy; Social credit; Digital ID; Vax passports; Loss of liberty; 15-minute cities; Modern Monetary Theory; Global recession; Hyperinflation; Stagflation; Central Bank Digital Currency; Digital Wallets; Digital I.D.; Food Shortage; WEF/Great Reset; Agenda 2030; Child-sacrifice; Loving abortion; Abortion as a Health Issue; Surrogate babies for gays and lesbians; The return to Moloch; LGBTQ++agenda; Gender dysphoria; Gender fluidity; Child grooming; Election fraud; Blackrock; Vanguard; State Street; Loss of borders; Illegal immigration; Redefining words; Redefining marriage; ESG scores; Covid lockdowns; “The Science (R)”; Persecution of The Church; Mass Formation Psychosis; Censorship; Critical Race Theory; Rewriting of history; DNA Hacking; Trans-human experimentation; Implantable devices; Degradation of work ethic; Universal Basic Income; Attacks on food processing; Cyberattacks; Power grid failure; Ransomeware; Decimation of US Military; Drag queen story hour; “Diversity”; (Provably) Manufactured climate crisis;

All this, and just for starters…

1.) We know, as Believers, that there WILL come a time that it actually IS the end, the End of All Things. This should stand alone as immutable. So the question that remains for Christians is, not “if,” but “when?” Some say we aren’t intended to know, and maybe from the standpoint of a SPECIFIC DATE, they would be correct. But the Bible, yes, even Jesus Himself, talks not only of being “ready,” but describes many, many signs to look for. So this says to me that although we aren’t to know the time or date, we ARE to know the season. Seasons provide evidence that they are coming. It seems that this season to come, The Season To End All Seasons, will provide us with very distinct signs as well.

So, why does this matter?

Old Testament text and prophecy spoke, literally, from the first part of Genesis, of The Savior to come who would restore the severed relationship between God and man. Generation upon generation shared and spoke of this assumption and constantly discussed the signs of its approach. The signs were many, and were described in intimate detail… …detail down to the fate of The Savior’s clothing… detail as to the lineage of The Savior. It is a conservative estimate that Jesus fulfilled over 300 separate prophesies during His time as a man on earth. The Jews studied these prophecies, literally, religiously.

AND. THEY. MISSED. HIM!

Aside from the creation of the earth, and life on it, (and it was hard to have missed that event if you were there, ha-ha,) it would be a simple argument to describe Jesus’ arrival and resurrection as the single most important event in all human history. Easily the second-most important event in human history, then, would be the END of human history, and the Bible does not lack in its descriptions of what THAT will look like.

WOULDN’T YOU HATE TO MISS THIS?

And most of you will. Well, that is, you will until you don’t. It will become undeniable at some point that the end is what’s actually happening. That point of recognition will come at different times for different people, depending on their criterion for being convinced. I’d rather be early rather than late, i.e. make a “type-one” error, that is, assuming it is when it might not be.

Because I think it matters. I don’t go quietly into that good night. Life is too important. The results of life are too important. Our responsibilities as Christians are too important to continue on, thinking “Ca va, ca va…” We are CALLED to a higher level than just surviving. WHEN the end of time approaches, I firmly believe that it is the Believers who are to lead the way through the fast-approaching, maleveolent darkness. We need to survive as long as we are able, and the only way to ensure your chances of this are to be watchful and thusly prepared at whatever level we are capable. Suicide through ignorance is a loathsome, slothful, lazy and shameful way to die. I plan to die fighting and trying. Which means living as long as I can. And so I interpret the signs my Lord has given me as responsibly and intellecutally honestly as I am able with the intention of doing the thing demanded of us all: living. And helping to live.

2.) “This time is different”

Yes, this is a tried (if not tired) and true meme, dating back generations; but one day it will be true. I think this is that time. The reasons I think that This Time is Different are twofold:

One, all the things I mentioned at the beginning of this article are, for practical purposes, GLOBAL. This is clearly, if not a coordinated effort, highly, um, “coincidental.” As far as I know, there have never before been events like these unfolding globally, simultaneously. The Bible talks about the End of Times as being a global event, exclusive to no one, inclusive to all. Granted, I’ve only lived just over a half-century (!) but I can certainly attest to my tiny slice of time as a definite buildup to the unique nature of what we see now. Which brings me to my second reason for thinking that This Time Is Different:

Technology.

There may, in fact, be “nothing new under the sun,” when it comes to human nature. But when it comes to technology, that is actually part of its definition. Technology is, by definition, “new.” Clearly there is a difference between discovery and invention, and as far as discovery goes, then, well, NO… there is nothing new under the sun… just the finding of what has always been. But invention is part of the meaning of technology. And invention IS new.

We have, finally, after literally All This Time, invented the ways to usher in the things described in many passages of prophesy that are integral parts of what is described as the End of Times. Mainly the microchip has been the modus of all that shows itself, now, to be the primary enabler of everything global and information oriented. Certainly the Mark of the Beast was an impossibility until we arrived right.. about.. HERE… …obviously the means by which one’s ability to freely trade being strategically throttled, en mass, could never have occurred until now. The strategic crackdown on speech and the resultant punishments that acompany violations were impossible until now.

The ability to spread the Gospel, literally all across the surface of the planet has never been possible until now.

Technology has always been the wildcard that changes, often unpredicatably, to create the Black Swan moments in history. It will be the catalyst for the ultimate Black Swan of all time.

3.) Circles.

I shared this idea with a group of men a couple weeks ago and it seemed well-recieved. For those who are paying attention, their circles are getting smaller.

By “circles,” I mean areas of concern; areas that concern us; areas with which we share some intimacy, areas that directly matter to us as individuals.

Not everyones’ circles are getting smaller; in fact, there is a very strong “globalist agenda” being promoted and promulgated by millions every day. But one main salient difference between this “globalist” plurality, and those I would consider like-minded readers of this column, is that the globalists believe that time will stretch on forever, and whatever becomes of humanity will follow along with it. We “others” do not believe this to be true. We believe that a time will come where God wraps things up. (sound of whistle) “OKAY! EVERYONE! OUT OF THE POOL!!”

What comes next is a different subject for a different day, but one thing is certain: those in this camp are watching their circles get smaller, faster and faster, day by day.

In the sixties we were told by Paul Erlich and others that the end of the world was nigh, and not in a spiritual sense; rather, the delicate mortal coil of our planet was in peril due to our (humans’) irresponsible stewardship of it and its resources. We were the parasite, we were told, and to prolong our habitat’s ability to sustain us we needed to make drastic changes, fast. Most of the world, even people like you and me, were in one accord on this: when they began to refer to the WORLD as a TINY PLANET, we began to see the danger we were in! So Vulnerable! (“Worlds” are relatively big; “planets” are relatively small. Note the change in the vernacular at around this same time.)

Our circles were as big as the WORLD (planet). Bigger, even, if you counted the US moonshots in the late sixties and early seventies.

Then the eighties came along, and planetary ecological alarmism took a back seat to Nationalism, particularly under Reagan who made it cool to love your country. (Obviously I’m using broad, sweeping generalities..)

Our circles were, then, shrunk down to the size of our country; our NATION. I would argue, semi-effectively, that this is about when the Great Schism in America began, and some continued down the established path of “forever-ism” while a distinct minority began to see what they felt was the handwriting on the walls; “Atlas Shrugged,” Brave New World,” “1984,” “Harrison Bergeron,” and, well, “The Book of Revelation” didn’t seem so whacky anymore. Typically these people were called, “Conspiracy Theorists,” Preppers,” or “Doomers.”

More quickly, now…

Our RESPONSE to Covid 19 (NOT the virus itself…) shrank our circles down to about the sizes of our STATES. This is evidenced by the fact that almost nobody knew or cared about who was the governor of which state until Covid. Suddenly it became ALL that mattered as we fled one state for another, seeking either liberty or security, depending on our individual World View. The Federal State became a microcosm of that very thing. It became very clear that, Disney Corporation notwithstanding, Florida and California were VERY different states embodying VERY different world views.

And here we are, ready-set-go 2023, with all the things that I mentioned at the top of this (lengthy, sorry-not-sorry) piece, ahead of us, on both sides of us, and in our rearview mirror. Our circles continue to get even smaller.

The NEA weaponizing the Justice System against concerned school parents made our circles COUNTY sized. As have sherriff’s announcements that they will not enforce certain gun laws that threaten their citizen’s 2nd Amendment rights. Suddenly sherrifs and mayors are the new “governors.”

Can anyone deny this is happening? At the same time, those from whom we split decades ago are full-on “globalism, baby.” The bifurcation couldn’t be more evident nor volatile. Prove me wrong.

My opinion is that we are now at the tail end of the “State” circle and heading into the beginning of the “County/Town” circle. I don’t have trouble clearly seeing into the very near future where our circles are neighborhood/family/church sized. Do you know your neighbors? Do you know your family? Do you HAVE a church? This is going to matter. You can’t do everything you need to survive this coming malevolent darkness yourself.

At this point, if you don’t see it, I don’t believe that you will.

Where will you be, with whom will you be, and what will you be thinking when it hits you?

“There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. When you kill a man, you steal a life... you steal his wife's right to a husband, [and] rob his children of a father. When you [tell a] lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness... there is no act more wretched than stealing.”

― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

Making things simple should be an endeavor for mankind; explaining more phenomena with fewer words is progress.

In ancient Norse mythology, lightning was explained as the gods throwing bolts of energy at each other; thunder apparently had something to do with Thor’s goats (goats?) pulling him across the sky in his chariot. Of course, there were backstories explaining each of these events separately, and multiple confounding elements requiring even further tale-telling and eye-rolling explanations.

But, unhappily for Zeus and Thor, we developed the Scientific Method and [fast-forward a bunch of centuries] eventually found out that lightning and thunder are actually just two ways of detecting the same thing: Atmospheric friction. The lightning superheats the air around it and the expanding concussion makes a really loud “BOOM!” The same thing happens when you make your bed on a dry morning, and you hear the crackles and pops (tiny “booms”) from the blanket when you move it around.

This simplification is progress.

This is what Khaled Hosseini, author of the book “The Kite Runner” did when he concluded that all sins could be traced back to some form of theft, as he states in his famous quote. Rather than trace the subtle contributions to every sin committed by every human since the dawn of time, he fast-forwarded to the logical conclusion and eliminated trillions of pages from The Cosmic Book of Explanation.

All sin is theft.

Whether you agree with this conclusion isn’t the point. Certainly, the Bible deals with the topic in far more wide-reaching and impactful ways, (sin is disobedience) and the purpose of my little piece here isn’t to debate any discrepancy thereof per se. But consider the relief when you can condense what you thought was an infinitely complex and multi-dimensional concept and conclude: all that you once thought was impossible to contain could really just be encapsulated in just a couple words or three.

“You mad, bro?”

At breakfast with a bunch of guys a couple of weeks ago, one of us (thank you, Walter!) brought to the [literal] table some bible-searching he had done on the topic of anger.

Anger is as ancient as man himself. God addresses it in Genesis 4 when he asks Cain why he is angry. In Ephesians 4 Paul emphasizes “in your anger, do not sin.” James writes that we should be slow to anger because our anger doesn’t bring about God’s righteousness. Proverbs suggests that you not choose the company of one who is easily angered. (Which makes me wonder why I have any friends left at all…)

One of the points Walter made in his discussion was that “[…anger] makes us feel… ...powerless.” And it was at this point that I had my epiphany. Walter was on to something simple and profound.

Epiphany: A sudden insight or intuitive understanding (The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.)

Anger doesn’t make us feel powerless.

No.

Powerlessness makes us feel angry.

All anger comes from powerlessness. Let’s make it personal: You’re angry because you don’t have power. Power is manifest through control. You get angry because you don’t have, or have lost, the power to CONTROL. This means losing the ability to prevent bad things from happening; Happening to you, to your loved ones, to your culture, your possessions, your race, your species, your faith… We are happy when we find ourselves in control of things, enabling those things that produce comfort and security or preventing those things that produce discomfort or harm.

Case-in-point: You’re in a hurry, driving to an important destination. You have two lanes of road at your (presumed) disposal, but, guess what? The guy in the left lane has driven up, abreast of the guy in the right lane, and matched his speed. (Which, since you’re in a hurry, happens to be five miles per hour below the speed limit.)

Raise your hand if this doesn’t elicit anger from you. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

And now we have our answer as to WHY you are angry: Powerlessness. Come on. I mean, what CAN you do? Drive on the sidewalk? Pass in the turn lane? Bump one of the cars out of the way? Learn to hover? Of course not. (nobody can hover) Is the place you are trying to go really SO important that you would risk hurting people and getting a ticket, besides? So you drive along, angry, powerless.

Suppose there’s a Drag Time Story Hour at your local library. Peaceful protesters (only small fires) are hauled off by the police because “hate” is a felony.

Are you angry yet? Why? Because you are powerless.

Suppose you weren’t powerless; suppose you could drive down to the library, scold the cops, make Pollie Esther (real name) put on an overcoat and go home, liberate the children and the parents who brought them there, and effectively help those parents to see the errors of their ways…

You wouldn’t feel angry, then. You’d feel victorious; righteous; effective… …purposeful.

Think of all the times you’re angry, and then think, (REALLY think:) why?

Yes, I understand there is a thing we call “righteous anger,” and this almost always results from some perception of injustice. But, then, again, isn’t that pretty much the primary anger component of “injustice?” Powerlessness to advance that which is just?

Which brings us the admonition by God to avoid anger, and angry people… (of whom I am one, regrettably). When we manifest our own powerlessness through anger, does that, then, imply a lack of faith in the fact that GOD IS NOT POWERLESS?

And by extension, would that, then, prove that anger is a matter of FAITH and not of CONDITION?

Paul said that he had managed to figure out a way to be content in all things; in prison, at play, asleep, and in debate… Was that because he had faith that God was willing and capable, in His perfect plan, to leverage His power in the times when Paul could not?

Is this, then, The Message? When two cars match each other’s speed, right next to each other, five miles below the speed limit, should we then defer to the fact that God COULD make a path for you to pass, but CHOOSES not to because of some higher, divine will at work? It may seem pedantic, but maybe not. Maybe there’s an accident up ahead He doesn’t want you to be a part of. Maybe if you got to your destination “in time” you would encounter an undesirable who could cause you to sin even more. Maybe, maybe, maybe…. Literally, God only knows.

But what I have learned (am learning) is that I DON’T KNOW. And maybe I don’t have to. Maybe I could choose “contentment in all things.”

Maybe I’d have more friends! And God bless you all who are my longsuffering friends, regardless. Thank you, Jesus.

(this is paraphrased, for legal purposes…)

The student disgrees with the writer of the original post that there is any form of socialism in the USA today. The respondent does agree that the term is floated and used inappropriately at times in reference to US policies, but not that an actual socialist agenda is being pursued in any way.

Further, the reader concedes that the US does have socially progressive reforms, but not actual socialist policies.

The responent concludes that the writer of the original post is guilty of conflating rhetoric and implementation.

My argument is there doesn’t need to be a specific stated policy to have official “socialism.”

This class discussion forum focuses on Venezuela, once the most prosperous country in the Southwest hemisphere, and its plunge to devastating depths of humiliating despair. The material graphically parallels the path Venezuela has chosen with the one the United States seems to be following.

My response to this student follows thusly:

Well executed, and therefore a good grade; (I gave him a “100”) but you couldn't, in my opinion, be more wrong.

Politically progressive middle management is, at great expense to corporations, adopting and implementing policies and procedures that are costing the corporations, literally, in aggregate, hundreds of billions.  For example: Disney Corporation, which is laying off over 7,000 employees due to plunging profits.  These plunging profits are directly related, (correlative and causative) to the progressive social positions the corporation is being forced to adopt due to internal pressures. 

But, isn't this the socialist utopia? 

Companies being owned and controlled by the employees, and not the "greedy executives?"  Obviously, Disney is only one of hundreds of examples of this. It looks like Mars/M&Ms may have learned their lesson *just* in time… And I’m glad… I’m happy to be buying M&Ms again.

Listen, too, to the explosion of the word "Equity" in virtually every single government entity that currently exists.  Equity is *the* single most reliable watchword of Marxism.  Equity refers not to opportunity, but exclusively to outcome.  We are quickly being changed from a merit-based culture and economy to an equity-in-outcome-based economy.  

And how about the state's control over speech via "defacto" branches of the government, aka "social media?"  Private entities, you may argue?  How private are they when the government can, at will, threaten the very existence of a "private entity" with regulation and dissolution if the "private entity" doesn't toe the government-specified line?

Sorry.

The United States in 2023 makes all of Europe look like pikers regarding the adaptation of socialism.

Prove me wrong.

The point here is that socialism is about much more than the traditional focus on a system of economics; socialism is a mindset, a cultural pressure, a worldview that eschews the individual and the things that motivate that individual to act. Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand is chopped off in a socialist utopia. There is no spontaneous, voluntary collaboration that gives us comfort, convenience, safety, security, freedom, communication, autonomy, or relief. Socialism expects a dropped ball to go up. It thinks we can take a bath with a plugged-in toaster if we do it the right way. It expects proscribed behavior without reward for said behavior. It focuses on punishment rather than incentive. It legalizes theft, whether it be of material possessions, original thought or an individual’s time. It funnels freedom of the many to the very few.

Why don’t we hear of this in economics courses?

Why don’t they want us to know?

So I will try to refrain.

Irregardlessly of pet peeves, (one of mine is when people say, “irregardlessly…”,) I wanted to host an exchange with a perspective offered by a reader who, having perused my initial offering on CBDC, had some things he agreed with and some, not so much. The contributor shall remain nameless until such time as he wishes to publicly engage.

Argument FOR digital currency.

1. Convenience. Man, it is easy to not deal with cash. And I don't have to watch millennials try to make change.

First of all, points for noting millennials’ inability to make change. Whenever I see it [this small act of competence displayed], it puts a little smile on my heart. “There is hope,” I think… then reality comes crashing back when they finish their next sentence with, “right??”

But more to the point: convenience is outrageously overrated in my opinion, especially when it is demonically leveraged to separate us from our liberties and our privacies. (Right?)

I would (and have) gone so far as to say that I would happily give up the microchip if it meant a return to the social construct we as a culture enjoyed before social media. And before you cry, “but… medical advances…” my pre-response, post covid is…. “really?”

2. No need to loan people money when they "forgot their wallet."

There is a simple solution to this problem: don’t loan people money. Also, is it really that big a problem to loan small amounts of folding money to someone [with whom you are presumably comfortable enough] that they would ask for the loan?

3. Instant transaction. Someone has a marker at poker, I don't have to wait until they play again to get paid. They send me money electronically right then.

Again, with the convenience; I argue, again, that regardless of the benefits measured in utility of convenience, they pale in comparison to the liberties, freedoms, and privacies we surrender due to this utility.

In fact, I would also argue (not with facts but with anecdotal observation and experience) that this is exactly what “THEY” (whoever “they” are) are hoping for and expect: that the general populace loves their conveniences so much that we would all be willing to sacrifice autonomy for this [relatively] small benefit. How better put than, “you’ll own nothing and be happy?” In fact, a CBDC all but eliminates the idea of “private property.” How can it be property if it can be taken from us at will, without due process, simply based on a random set of moral codes we call a “social credit score?”

Not in the United States? It’s already in our rear-view window. We already lose our livelihoods due to unacceptable speech. Without due process. How is this any different from losing our property/money?

4. Who cares? Enough of the economy is already digital, what is a few bucks in my wallet going to change?

This belies a misunderstanding of the stated implications of a CBDC: the new digital currency would not only be the EXCLUSIVE legal means of trade but would be programmable as well. There will be no alternative to digital trade, no physical-currency-way-around-it. And with the power to control all legal trade at a micro-personal level, this forced method of trade would be subject to the rules placed on the currency at the whim of the central bank that controls the currency. If your “carbon footprint” is too big for the purpose you serve in society (coughcoughbillgates) then you lose some of your spending (trading) power. If you eat too much meat and not enough bugs, your ability to buy animal products is throttled and the unlimited availability of bug-powder is provided to you personally!

The answer is: this changes everything.

5. If THEY want to restrict my ability to spend money, THEY can freeze my bank accounts. Today. As I'm typing if THEY choose.

True. Just ask the Canadian truckers.

Yet however despicable this eventuality may be, it is currently binary: in this case, you either have access to your money or you don’t. This creates a much harder “sell” for those who are seeking to freeze your assets. A much easier sell is to convince the populace that, in the name of social welfare and quality of life, the incremental throttling and selective disallowance of individuals’ access to their funds is a socially responsible plan. There’s a huge difference between throttling and stopping. One is way more obvious.

6. Think of all the tax revenue THEY would collect if people didn't avoid taxes through cash transactions.

This goes without saying, and I can’t see how it is counted as a benefit to the layperson. Unless you think you’re not being forced to donate enough to the mutilation of minors and murder of babies as it currently stands.

Dear Reader concludes: (rather correctly, I agree,)

Now, WHEN digital currency takes over, society will go back to your first stage of voluntary exchange, trading goods/services for goods/services. Mow my lawn kid and I'll give you a dozen eggs. Truth is, it's coming and there is nothing we can do to stop this from happening. I've read Revelation. S**t gets real right before the end...

Keep in mind as you read this that I have no intention of bringing tons of receipts to this particular discussion. I’m not in “deep research” mode, rather, I just want to aggregate some thoughts, and that is what this forum is for. I earnestly ask that you use the comments section to give me your feedback. Again, I am most interested in learning how my thinking is WRONG, not RIGHT. I don’t care to live in an echo chamber.

If you haven’t found the comments section yet, please click over to the actual web link for this substack and you will find comments at the bottom. Sometimes it seems like they’re hidden. Please use them.

I’m not aware of a time, in my lifetime, that there has been an intrusion of our sovereign property like this one we are watching now. I suppose one could effectively argue that the 2+ million illegal invaders coming in through our southern border is even more of an invasion, but that is essentially “death by duck bite.” This one here today could be “decapitation by a Great White.” The Cuban Missile Crisis returns to memory, but, as has been stated by some, there was nothing illegal about that. It was just scary.

Leave us now explore the disparity of our leaders’ reactions, then and now: John F. Kennedy, in 1962, essentially stood toe-to-toe with Khruschev, publicly addressing the crisis and explaining what it meant to US citizens. This, then, was our elected leader’s response to a LEGAL but threatening act by the USSR.

Compare/contrast Kennedy’s response to a legal threat in 1962 to Biden’s response to an ILlegal invasion of our sovereign airspace, just yesterday.

Go ahead. I’ll wait.

What in heaven’s name is going on?

I don’t care who you voted for in 2020. I don’t care if you voted for a ham sandwich. Look at the expression on the aid’s face as Biden smugly turns and walks away from the mic: they clearly never had any intention of even acknowledging this unprecedented and potentially catastrophic event. I’m asking for someone who voted for and supports Joe Biden, please… I beg you… help me understand what it is that you still see in this man that gives you confidence… I’ll be objective if you will, too. I promise. I just want to know!

Biden, and his DOD, have left us all out here swinging in the wind to speculate.

Therefore let’s speculate!

First note that whatever I suggest or question, the answer or response will most likely have arrived before you, dear reader, ever have time to consider what I’ve written here. Events unfold quickly these days and this event shall be no exception.

1.) How many balloons are there? I have come to understand (as of last night, the evening of 2/3/23) that there may be a total of three: one just above the US/Canadian border, one (yesterday afternoon) over Montana, and yes, apparently one over… (checks notes…) Central America…?

2.) The official word from the DOD is that nothing has been “shot down” at any point yet. But how do we explain the seemingly valid footage from over Montana that clearly shows a detonation and explosion of some sort, high in the sky, late Friday afternoon-ish?

The description of this event…

A woman named Dolly Moore caught an explosion in the sky above Billings, Montana on video and it immediately went viral after a Chinese spy balloon was reported over the United States. The video has been verified, (emphasis mine) but there have been no reports (same) of an explosion in Montana’s airspace.

“Ok, so here’s what I just caught I few minutes ago out my window. I saw a jet go by so fast and then explosion in the sky. Holy crap! Billings MT.”

This reported event took place a good while after the balloon had “moved on” to the Southeast… So what was this… “jet?” What… “exploded?” Has anybody considered the possibility that what Dolly witnessed was an ICBM taken out by one of our defensive measures? Is this too dramatic? Okay, then… what DID Dolly see?

3.) The DOD also pointed out while the balloon was over Montana, that shooting it down would be dangerous for civilians on the ground.

Montana has the lowest (except for Alaska, I think,) population density of any state in the nation; wouldn’t that be the SAFEST time to shoot it down?

Unless

4.) What if the payload under the balloon is weaponized and triggered by an altitude-contingent switch? Anybody remember the (loser) film “SPEED?” Drop below 55 mph ( I think it was 55,) and the bus blows up into smithereens. How about: “descend below 30,000 feet and the low-yield nuke goes off…” What if the DOD knows this?

I can practically assure you that even if it isn’t equipped with a nuke (EMP insurance for the Chinese) it is armed with self-destruct contingencies to disallow our collection of intelligence.

5.) What if there are biochems on board one or all of these devices? Does shooting them down help spread them? Or does it even matter? Will they be/ have they been spread already?

6.) The CCP claims that their cute li’l ol’ weather b’loony drifted off its intended course. Have you seen its actual, evident course?

Yeah. That’s not a balloon that’s been “blown off course…” if it maybe caught a little corner of the Aleutian Islands or maybe even the tip of Maine, I could see that as an explanation… But THIS “UNINTENDED COURSE” TAKES IT PRECISELY ACROSS THE HEARTLAND OF THE U. S. of A. Even its path up through the aforesaid islands and straight through Alaska looks pretty damn perfect if you ask me.

7.) As I write this, it is around noon mountain time. If this thing DOES have a low-yield nuke on it, if it is detonated at any time during the next few hours, the result will remove the entire Eastern Seaboard from relevance. The US is done. WW3 has ensued. And still, what about the other (2?) balloons?

8.) The deafening silence from this White House is over-the-top suspicious and inappropriate. This is more than cowardice: either someone in there has been paid off to shut up, or, maybe even worse, threatened… I don’t particularly care for either scenario. Is there a third possibility for Biden’s silence? Am I missing something? I’d like to be as generous as possible. I implore anyone with counter opinions to comment on this point in particular below.

9.) Perhaps the creepiest thought I’ve had yet is that the Chinese don’t NEED to spy on us with balloons. It turns out that balloons are slow and big and bright and round and fragile and obvious. Hardly “SPYware…” Weren’t we all once shown that they can, literally, (yes, LITERALLY) read your license plate from space satellites miles and miles up??? Don’t the Chinese have space satellites? Haven’t they been using them? Haven’t we always suspected/known that they were? What intel can they get from a balloon that they can’t get from a satellite?? Which, finally, begs the question: What’s the advantage of a balloon(s) if not to carry a payload? It just seems like a question that should be asked.

10.) Regardless of the outcome of this “Chinese Balloon Crisis” the result will be a much, much weaker America. We will have just demonstrated to North Korea, Iran, China, Russia, et.al. that we won’t respond in any way to overt exploitation of our personal property. Some have said that this may be the entire point of this endeavor, but it seems like not enough ROI for the Chinese. They already know how spineless we are and pretty much everybody else does, too. Heather’s Two Mommies (c. 1990) are in the old folks’ home now, and Heather is now an Antifa-BIPOC-lesbian environmentalist-trans-drag-“male”-(He, Hers, They, Zis) serving as a commander/(counselor) in our (formerly) armed forces.

China isn’t scared.

I, for the first time in my lifetime, sorta am.

Mike Sulhoff

It is, for the most part, unreadable, which, some may say, is deliberate… Cynicism aside, I undertook the onerous task of reading it, comprehending it to the best of my abilities, and translating it, section-by-section, to “Third-Grade-ese.” Today I’m going to show you the translation, and then discussion may ensue thereafter.

For the original version, click here or the bold links above.

Aaand here’s what it says:

“The President’s Command About How to Make Good Digital Dollars”

Section 1

It seems like more and more peeps are enjoying the benefits of using “digital assets”, (after now, we’ll just call them all “Bitcoin.”) They are saying that they like using Bitcoin to pay for stuff.

This is cool and all, but it might make it easier to people to steal OTHER people’s stuff.

Bitcoin, if not managed by the Federal Government, may make it hard for BIPOC peeps to get money to buy stuff with.

Privately owned and managed companies LIKE Bitcoin, have gotten, like, SUPER popular between 2016 and 2021… In fact, Bitcoins went from there being about $14B of them to around $3T of them... In just five years!

The US government doesn’t believe that Bitcoin can deal with its own problems without the government helping them out and pretty much taking them over by telling them all the stuff they gotta do. And then, like, totally making sure they do it.

Also, Climate Change and Pollution. Because sCieNcE.

Section 2

Again, we’re thinking that private companies who are already running Bitcoin are not good enough or willing to be careful enough with all this complicated stuff for their customer’s own good. In other words, Bitcoin doesn’t care about your security, they don’t care about everyone being able to use their service, and they don’t care about the planet.

We haven’t been regulating Bitcoin enough. Bitcoin doesn’t care about security or fairness, so the government needs to be allowed to tell Bitcoin how to run its business. This would include hurting Bitcoin if it doesn’t follow the new rules the government creates, just especially for Bitcoin.

The government also needs to make sure that if anyone else invents their own version of Bitcoin, then they all play by exactly the same rules.

As the government discovers new and creative ways that it feels people can abuse Bitcoin, or vice versa, then the government should be allowed to change the rules whenever they want to.

Sometimes people do things with their wealth that the government thinks are bad. Since wealth can be Bitcoins, and since Bitcoin is digital, it’s easier for the government to control what people do with their Bitcoins. In this case, the government should be able to take control over people’s Bitcoins when they are doing these bad things with it. This is good, because when people just use cash, or when people just use Bitcoin as it is now, people can do bad things whenever they want. The government should be able to determine what is bad, and then be able to stop people from doing those bad things with their Bitcoins. They can’t do this when people use cash.

Also, people do bad things all over the world. Since sometimes bad things happen in other countries, then sometimes they happen here. Because of this, we should try to stop it everywhere. It is the United States’ job to do this.

The United States government thinks that being in charge of all this will make the United States strong.

Some people can’t get bank accounts, because banks have to make sure that people who want bank accounts are responsible with their money. The government thinks that anyone who wants a bank account should have one. This means even if they: don’t have any money, any income, or any ability to show that they are good with money.

Banks, as we now know them, and Bitcoin, are bad for the environment. How this is so is not made clear.

Section 3

A WHOLE BUNCH of government people will be required to help make all these changes in how we are allowed to use Bitcoin.

Section 4

So, since Bitcoin is so dangerous for the environment and Bitcoin (and banks) unfortunately seem to care about the goodness of the people using them, then what the government is going to do is to make its OWN Bitcoin. It’s going to be called a “CBDC”, or, a “Central Bank Digital Currency.” This will take the place of banks AND Bitcoin. This is how it will work:

First, the government is going to look into all the ways that a CBDC might help people. They are also going to see what all would be involved in creating this CBDC.

The US CBDC should be able to work with other countries’ CBDCs, as long as the other countries’ CBDCs are as good as ours is.

The United States’ CBDC should make paying for things in other countries easier and cheaper and more secure. This might make economies stronger. We should also make sure we set the system up so that the US CBDC is the strongest CBDC of everybody. But it is still possible that somehow another country might find a way to make their CBDC stronger than ours. Because of this, the government needs to constantly be thinking up ways to make sure that this never happens.

Janet Yellen, the person (she/her/it) who is in charge of all our money, has 180 days from March 9, 2022 to talk to a bunch of other government people (they/them) to see if they can find a way to pull all this off. They need to then tell the President what they decided. They have to consider things like: how readily will the people accept this new money? Do we have enough computers to do all this? What will this change do to the existing U.S. financial system? How will all this change how people pay for things? What will happen to economic growth? Will it hurt national security? Will it be so that everybody can participate in this new way of paying for things? (It is assumed that there are some people who can’t pay for things the way we do it now… even if they have money.) What will we do about the fact that there will be CBDC AND Bitcoin? What if other countries’ CBDCs get to be better than the U.S.’s one, and what should we do about that? How easy will it be for people who do bad things to use the CBDC to do those things?

How easy will it be for the Federal Reserve to continue to manipulate how much money there is and what interest rates should be if we do the CBDC?

The Attorney General, at the same time, will help decide what laws need to be made or changed to do the CBDC.

Section 5

CBDCs might make it easier for bad guys to rip other people off.

So we might need to make a lot of changes in the way we pay for things, get paid, and the way we store our money. We need to come up with a way to make sure everyone accepts these changes. We need to know what kinds of laws have to be made to make sure everybody does it the way we say.

We will need a bunch of selected people to tell us if we have enough fast computers so that all this can happen without making people’s money unsafe. Dealing with the CBDC should also be a pleasant experience for citizens. Also, we need to make sure that the computers are good enough so that no one will miss any welfare payments.

We also will need a report explaining how the FBI and other government cops are going to enforce the rules with CBDC and what they are going to do with the bad guys when they catch them.

We also will need to know if a CBDC will make it harder or easier for companies to compete with one another. Also, we need a report on how this will affect trading in the stock markets.

One of the biggest things we have to be worried about is how the CBDC will help or hurt the planet. Can we use CBDC’s to make sure that people and companies don’t pollute? Can we use CBDCs to make it easier to charge people and companies money when they DO pollute? Can we use CBDCs to charge people and companies money when they use too much electricity?

Section 6

We need to find weaknesses in Bitcoin in order that so we can make laws and regulations that will make Bitcoin go away so the CBDC can take its place.

Section 7

Bitcoin is used by bad guys. If we make enough rules and laws and regulations for Bitcoin, we can make it go away so that the CBDC is the only way people can pay for things.

We also need to make it so the FBI and government cops can arrest Bitcoin for not following the new rules EXACTLY.

We (the government) consider these last two items to be “opportunities” for getting rid of Bitcoin.

Section 8

Since the United States CBDC will be working with other countries’ CBDCs, then we all have to have the exact same rules. Almost like it’s all just one big bank for the whole planet. The best way for this to happen is for The United States to be in charge of this bank.

Within 180 days of this order, we need to know pretty much exactly how the CBDC is going to put the Bitcoin out of business.

And then FTX happened….

“Why” isn’t what I’m after quite, just, exactly, yet…. I first want to examine some premises and build on them for further discussion and evaluation.

In the interest of keeping it simple, I want to examine a (very) Brief History of Exchange in order to set the rest of the table. So, for your critical and evaluative consumption, I present to you-all my observations regarding said construct:

NOTE: “Innate Utility, for our purposes, refers to the usefulness that is intrinsic, by its very nature, of a thing or even a service. There is nothing assumed or projected regarding a thing’s worth, therefore, than its self-evident utility… we are not considering ANY derivative value, i.e., “assigned” or “assumed” value. With “innate utility,” a thing’s value isn’t connected to the demand or supply of the thing, (both present and future), just the thing’s apparent and intrinsic properties and the utility they provide. A chicken is edible and lays eggs and provides calories, and maybe companionship, to its (probably lonely) owner. THAT is the chicken’s “innate utility.”

       History of Exchange

o   IN THE BEGINNING, you make everything you need to survive, all by yourself.

o MOVE FROM PRODUCTIVE INEFFICIENT (COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT) TO SPECIALTY TRADE

o You trade a chicken for a loaf of bread (both items have innate utility)

o   Chicken for gold for a loaf of bread (chicken translates innate utility to medium with universally accepted value, then translated back to innate utility of bread.)

o   Chicken for a personal check for a loaf of bread (assures the gold is in a specific bank)

o   Chicken for cash for a loaf of bread (assures the gold is in the economy) (gold standard)

o   MOVE FROM “ASSURE” TO “ASSUME” (what a difference one letter makes)

o   Chicken for cash for a loaf of bread (assumes baker will have faith in the strength of the fiat currency) (POST gold standard)

o   Chicken for debit for loaf of bread (assumes baker will have faith in the strength of the fiat currency for that particular bank and that particular customer)

o   MOVE FROM “ASSUME” TO “ALLOW” (COMPLETELY DEPENDENT and CONTROLLED)

o   Chicken for CBDC for loaf of bread (assumes the Central Bank feels that eating bread is good for you, and, therefore, for society, and ALLOWS you to buy the loaf of bread.)

END of PART ONE.

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This is my attempt to share (what I think and hope are) relatively original ideas and insights.

Full disclosure: it’s not about you; it’s all about me.

The greater incentive, here, is not to share my thoughts, but to hear what others think about my thoughts. Therefore I invite them. (Others’ thoughts…) There’s almost nothing worse than being wrong. This is your opportunity to tell me where I am wrong. Together, maybe we can figure out what is right.

This strongly suggests that this endeavor is to be politely combative, civilly argumentative, and, in the end, peacefully conciliatory. I don’t want to fight for fighting’s sake. I want to fight to seek truth. I want to challenge and be challenged.

Truth is extremely important now, arguably more than at any time before. And before you reply, “yes, that’s what we have ALWAYS said,…” let me submit my first argument: While mankind never changes, and neither does God, the wildcard that DOES change is technology. And it matters. Because technology is the main transport by which information is disseminated. Technology makes truth and all kinds of information (mis-, dis- and mal-) potentially equal. And therein lies the fight for the very soul of our cultures.

As time winds down, we, the Watchmen on the Walls, will be responsible for sounding alarms when the victories in the War on Truth seem to be leaning toward the enemy. The enemy has proven very effective at coercing the labors of those who profess to be champions of truth; and that is why the path MUST be narrow, with [relatively] few finding it.

Luke 21:36 - Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man.

I’m not sure what all, exactly, I’m going to be sharing. It will be eclectic, to say the least, and hopefully not TOO unreliably infrequent. The important thing is for us to engage, while we still are able. We have taken quite a lot for granted for quite a long time.

On your marks, get set, GO!

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